GOING OUT ON A LIMB TO SAVE A CENTURY-OLD TREE

Gary Warinner’s San Diego roots are so deep, he has a lifetime pass to ride the Giant Dipper roller coaster. He reaped the reward by helping win the uphill battle for its restoration in the 1980s.

Now Warinner is fighting for another wooden landmark in Mission Beach.

He’s trying to stop the city from cutting down the last Monterey cypress tree on Mission Boulevard. He’s been told he won’t win, but he’s heard that before. His father told him he was wasting his time 30 years ago.

“The tree obviously gives me pleasure,” Warinner said, eyeing it the other day. “It adds to the community. It just adds so much, and it asks so little. They don’t have to feed it. They don’t have to water it. Frankly, they didn’t have to trim it. They should have trimmed it, but they didn’t, and it survived in spite of what was not done to it.”

San Diego’s street division maintains more than 200,000 trees. This is a story about its most contentious case — a tree that’s either nearing the end of what might be a century in Mission Beach or girding for another 100 years along a busy roadway.

Is San Diego really better off without this 30-foot-tall, leafy monument?

City officials say yes. Warinner and I say no. Et tu, San Diego?

City spokesman Bill Harris said the tree-removal decision was made after consulting with San Diego Gas & Electric, whose overhead power line is impacted, and four city arborists, three of whom called the tree unstable and a fourth who was leaning that way, like the tree. No date has been set for the work.

“We think we’ve done our due diligence on it, but we’re very sorry to see it go,” Harris said. “Taking trees down in San Diego is an emotional and carefully considered thing. We are very respectful of trees in San Diego simply because we struggle to keep the historic trees going.”

Storms in 2010 and 2011 left the tree without a substantial limb needed for stability, he said, and now the tree poses “imminent danger to traffic lanes in Mission Boulevard.”

Warinner, who runs a gardening and tree-services business, said the tree can be reshaped.

The city plans to replace it with a young Monterey cypress, but Warinner doubts it would survive the auto pollution and occasional flooding in that area.

He owns and lives in a three-unit apartment complex nearby. He voluntarily spruces up the neighborhood, and at 59, he has seen Mission Beach rise and fall over time, like a lung, like a leaf.

“I hope I don’t sound neurotic or like just a nut job to you,” he said. “I really feel slighted having done charity work for the city — painting out graffiti, calling when there’s streetlights out. No one does that. All they do is come down here to drink, do drugs and screw, which is OK, I guess, but someone has to take care of the neighborhood.”

Roots are important to Warinner. His mother died this year. His father, who lives in Arizona, has Alzheimer’s disease. That’s where Warinner was when he heard from a San Diego official that arborists said the tree must go.

That was about three weeks after he heard a chain saw while he was out whacking weeds in the city median, a good Samaritan act he does on occasion. The worker stopped, and Warinner began a series of so far fruitless phone calls.

“The tree is leaning. It has termites. Big chunks of it on the north side have died,” Warinner said. “However, that tree is very well alive and it’s been leaning if not for decades, for years. I know about five years ago, I backed my now-deceased truck into it trying to parallel park.

“If they’re really worried about the weight, they can cut it on the top a little bit, thin it out, lace it like they do the other trees,” he added. “This is good for me. It’s good for the block. It’s good for the beach. It’s good for the city. Frankly, it’s good for the planet. I’m going to try to speak up and make a difference.”

And if his pleas don’t work?

“I really can’t tell you that I absolutely have enough self-control that I’m not going to cut down some of their palm trees if they cut this tree down,” he said. “I shouldn’t make threats, but I’ve got a fiery temper.”